That was interesting. The guy doesn't seem very sharp, but he's pushing himself hard to understand and communicate. I respect his earnest efforts, but it still seems like there's a lot of... what? Interference from all the lies he's absorbed, perhaps.

Like this at the end:

As an observer of the web and media for the past 20 years, I've noticed that the church hasn't really been involved in the World Wide Web. Because in terms of media development, the church -- the message of evangelicalism -- has always been at the forefront [of technology]. In the early days of radio, the church was ever-present. In the early days of television, the church was very present. In the early days of satellite -- two of the 10 transponders on the first satellite were owned by Christian organizations. So when the Web came along and nobody of the faith went near it, that fact caused me to have an epiphany, if you will. The reason they didn't go to it is because the web is a three-way communication street. It's not one-way. The network is top to bottom, but [the web] is bottom to bottom. It doesn't need any hierarchical approval.

And with Faith Nation, CBN is trying to turn a three-way communication medium [back] into a one-way. And for me that's an artificial use of the web. It's an open door for problems down the road. [The anarchic nature of the web] is a perfect vessel for the holy spirit. But it's not the perfect vessel for a hierarchical anything.

"A three-way communication street"? I'm sure he does better when he's not speaking off the cuff, but it's hard to follow the germs of insight when they end like that. He kinda gets the problem there, but it's not going to lead all that far out of the darkness. But an interesting portrait of, I guess, an incomplete turn from indoctrination to critical thought?

Also, and I haven't read the link, of day that the web has been absolutely fantastic for Christian craziness, schism, and so on. He has a very narrow definition of "church", which is hardly surprising.

The guy doesn't seem very sharp, but he's pushing himself hard to understand and communicate.

Agreed. He doesn't seem like the sharpest knife in the drawer, perhaps; but he does sound genuinely concerned, and I appreciate his efforts.

And this:

For example, if you believe that God rewards good Christians by making them prosperous, and you're not prosperous, you have to ask yourself why. And there's really only two answers to that question. One is that you're doing something wrong -- a.k.a. sinning -- and the other is that somebody out there is taking what rightfully belongs to you and you've got to do something about that. And that's a pretty easy sell to human beings -- we all want what we don't have.

This strikes me as a pretty good account of how a certain strain of American Calvinism, having morphed into an American prosperity gospel, could then be mobilized, via modern media (and now almost content-free, in theological terms!) into a politics of resentment, with Trump as exemplary Christian as its standard-bearer.

Don't drag good ol' Calvin into the prosperity gospel. It's gross but it ain't him (or his descendants), since "God will shower money upon the believers if you just do these three sweet tricks" is pretty much the exact opposite of Calvin. It's just weird American pentacostalism with can-do American nonsense as the whipped cream on top. I blame America.

26: Please note that I said 'American Calvinism,' and not Jean Calvin, the man himself (he was a serious and learned theologian, but I suspect he may have let loose some forces that were beyond his control...); but seriously, Halford, you surely cannot believe what you are saying here? As if American Puritanism had nothing whatsoever to do with the English and continental European Calvinist traditions from which it had emerged? And as if all of that weird American pentacostalism (a bizarre corruption of the original message of 'good ol' Calvin,' to be sure) had just sprung up like mushrooms from the ground, because of the condition of the American soil or something?

The prosperity gospel has a surprisingly complicated theological history, as my stuck-on-a-plane reading of Kate Bowler's Blessed told me. If going through the numbing was-this-a-dissertation history of who taught whom in the evangelical (and non-evangelical!) prosperity gospel lineage sounds like it might be your thing, you'll love the book, including the much less dry final two-thirds.

1: "[The anarchic nature of the web] [...is] not the perfect vessel for a hierarchical anything. "
I think is totally wrong. In the actual social web (Facebook, anyway, and AFAIK for effectively all people FB is the web) filter bubbles hide dissent, lynch mob behavior enforces conformity, and the vast majority of content isn't user-generated, it comes from news outlets.* And user behavior isn't egalitarian: the rule of thumb for social media managers is 1% of users post, 9% share, 90% are passive. In that environment it isn't that hard for a handful of hierarchies to dominate their own chunk of the web.** Which is a long way of saying, 2nd 2.
*eg. FB switched to the news feed interface because UGC just wasn't interesting enough.
**AIUI this is exactly what Bannon did with Breitbart.

the Bible says that God didn't destroy Sodom because of their sexual sins. He destroyed them because they didn't take care of the poor or the afflicted.

Which, remarkably, makes God appear even more of an asshole.Posted by: Mossy Character | Link to this
comment | 10-30-17 8:32 PM

43

I don't follow 42, but I am with Halford in the Jean Calvin is Innocent OK Liberation Front.

There is something weird and uniquely American about such phenomena as Mormonism and the Prosperity Gospel. If it owes anything to Calvinism it is not the idea of the chosen person, for Calvinists are very sure that they can never be certain that they are among the elect, but the typology of a chosen people, and of providential history. That comes through the British protestant self-understanding, where Rome was Babylon and we were Israel, to the American one, where Britain is Babylon and the colonists are Israel.

It's not a straightforward story of supercession: there were still British Israelites even while Americans were inventing Mormon fake history. But I think that a racialised version of this belief is a really important element of American politics to this day.

But if you're a member of the chosen people, yet find yourself working in Babylon without any health insurance, you're going to know on some level that you deserve a miracle.

POOR AND AFFLICTED OF SODOM AND GOMORRAH! YOUR RULERS CARE NOT FOR YOUR SUFFERING! BUT FEAR NOT, FOR I AM WITH YOU! I SHALL IMMOLATE YOU WITH A RAIN OF RIGHTEOUS FIRE! AND THERE SHALL BE NO MORE TEARS IN YOUR EYES!

I'd literally just got to the bit in "The Rules of the Game" where Jackie Fisher explains to George V that, given they have both the Straits of Dover in the south and Scapa Flow in the north, it is perfectly obvious that the British are God's chosen people. A sort of geostrategic version of the Prosperity Gospel.

47: Well there's this, for one. Founder converted from Catholicism by a Canadian Pentecostalist; but even if the taproot theology is uniquely American, I still think it's a stretch to say the entire movement is uniquely American; a bit like saying Buddhism is uniquely Indian.

Yeah, basically 43. Worth noting that there are in fact unpleasant right-wing Calvinists in the US, most prominently in Western Michigan, but those guys are still no-dancing, no-parties-on-Sunday types and have very little to do with the believe and get rich mode of the prosperity gospel people (and of course the mainline descendants of Calvin in the UCC Congregationalists/Presbyterians have zero to do with PG either). There's certainly some connection between prosperity gospel and traditional Protestsntism in some super broad sense of you zoom way out, and obviously the US's great tolerance for weird new Christian cults plays a role, but to the extent the prosperity gospel people have a geneology its via 19th Century pentacostals who explicitly broke with Calvinism, so hard to blame old JC (not that one) or his followers for the prosperity gospel.

I see the prosperity gospel people as modern hucksters who just took advantage of an obviously potentially successful niche, allowing people to think they could get rich through trying this one weird trick which happens to be what God wants. I mean, obviously that's a scam (and there's a good case that it's pretty much the antithesis of Christianity, certainly the antithesis of Calvin's thought) but it's not hard to see why it's an attractive doctrine to a lot of people given how people live in modern industrialized/post industrialized countries. Not much connection with anything earlier.

Despite being an atheist, I once while drunk ranted that Prosperity Gospel-type Christianity should be stripped of the title Christianity. The people I went to church with, as a kid, were so nice, and my pastor was a perfectly helpful and kind person. I know that mainline Protestant denominations are attracted to ecumenism, but they should declare war on the fundies, and cast them out of the church as frauds.

As a heathen, although I appreciate the broadness of the Nicene Creed (in today's context, at least), looking at it line by line, the majority seems to boil down to canon-establishment in the "Our god is bigger than your god" vein. There's a few lines implicating ethics and values on the ground ("for our sake he was crucified", "the forgiveness of sins"), but they're pretty vague.

Yes, it's very specific on the crucifixion and resurrection and Jesus is the best and all that. Useful if that's the big thing your heretics are questioning. But how did Jesus want us to live? Forgiveness, okay, salvation, great, but what is implied by that? Go back to the Bible, I guess, but then you have the same old problems of material and interpretation. So I'm not sure how useful a summary source it is for fundamental ethical divergence like the prosperity gospel's. I'm there are other creeds, but they'll be less universal.

I think the mainline Protestants all have formal declarations of faith

I'm a heathen myself, so I'm not reliable on this, but I think for some important strands of mainline Protestantism, they explicitly and precisely don't have this -- historically each believer is supposed to work out their own understanding and beliefs individually. Here's a link from the United Methodist Church describing itself as not a 'creedal church': http://www.umc.org/what-we-believe/why-do-we-say-creeds .

At which point it gets a little confusing figuring out what makes you a Methodist versus being not a Methodist, but that's not my problem.

63: The Nicene Creed is accepted by most (not I think all) formal churches, but all the churches have other, more detailed declarations about other things, which they don't agree on. Again, this is pedantry; all those statements presumably are concerned, as you say, mostly with theological infighting, not actual morality; but in terms of the theology, I don't think any of the evangelicals formally qualify as Christian.

66: I'm not reliable either. It depends what you mean by "mainline", too. I was thinking of the established European churches and their descendants: Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican, etc. Methodists don't fit there, but under your (correct) usage they do.

; but in terms of the theology, I don't think any of the evangelicals formally qualify as Christian.

I think this is nonsense. I mean, if you want to look at individual people and say that they fail to live up to Christian ideals so badly that you don't want to say they qualify as a Christian, I wouldn't do that as a non-Christian myself, but I suppose you could.

But as far as I know anything about explicit theological claims, the evangelical churches aren't wildly far off mainline Protestant churches -- the huge, glaring political and social differences are either irrelevant to theology or come from fairly minor differences in emphasis.

I think snark's book covers this but the prosperity gospel has taken hold pretty hard in black churches, which I find kind of baffling but I don't really get a vote. (I mean seriously Creflo Dollar is so super gross but has the best possible name for the job.) At the church we go to that's mostly along the lines of "I was about to have my power turned off but then a check I'd been waiting for for months showed up just in time, amen." I don't know if it feels different when there isn't meaningful prosperity involved, but it still makes me sad and scared.

Though a friend who used to be a mainstream black Christian (if one whose general response to all complaints was that you need a joint and an orgasm ASAP as opposed to prayers) is now SUPER into reiki and how the universe holds exactly what you need when you need it and your energy just needs to align and accept it and maaaan is that at least as bad.

I have a deadline so shouldn't be joining in, but I think you're wrong in 73, Moby. Yes, the leaders of the prosperity gospel churches are pure fraudsters, but the people who join them are often poor and in debt. Praying for money to cover the utility bill because God cares about you as an individual and wants you to flourish is just a few steps down the economic ladder from praying for a new Porsche for the same reason.

I don't think that it's very meaningful to say that the prosperity gospel people aren't "Christian" as a matter of "doctrine" -- I mean they will tell you they believe in Christ and why not believe them. But it's pretty clear that many of their beliefs, and most importantly the belief that God will shower you with wealth if you follow simple steps and that wealth is evidence of God's favor, are 180 degrees from any even quasi-plausible reading of the Gospels or most Western church doctrine, whether Protestant or Catholic. That's not a question of "theology" exactly, it's basically taking the core tenets of the religion and doing exactly the opposite thing.

But it's also not the first time this has happened, see e.g. the Crusades, where somehow the point of the Gospels became to conquer Jerusalem and kill a shit-ton of people. And you'd still call the Crusaders Christians. I basically think of the prosperity gospel guys as deeply misguided guys who have a worldly anti-Christian philosophy with Christian window dressing. In general, that's not historically unusual, it's just that our fine historical moment produces Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar instead of Guy of Lusignan.

What Ume said. And I should clarify that the pastors at the church we attend live simply and aren't getting rich or even middle-class off the church, still work day jobs. But there's also this idea that God wants you to be happy and will provide for you and hmmmmmmmm I'm not really okay with that. But I also don't go to church anymore because Lee does sometimes, so it really doesn't matter. People definitely believe they can manifest love and success through religion and maybe I shouldn't be such an Eeyore about it.

That God cares about you as an individual is definitely in the Gospels, as is the idea that God will take care of your needs. The idea that you get to determine your needs and that those needs might include a luxury automobile are both pretty firmly condemned.

69, 71, 74 &C: I've been speaking sloppily. My original 60 was in response to Walt's 59:mainline Protestant denominations are attracted to ecumenism, but they should declare war on the fundies, and cast them out of the church as frauds. [emphasis added]
I think Walt (and LB, Moby, Minivet) was using "the church" to mean "Christian" broadly defined, where I pedantically took it to mean a church as in an established church (RC, Anglican, etc.). Those churches have detailed declarations of faith to which (AFAIK) evangelicals (and other established churches) do not adhere. My position is, evangelicals don't belong to any established church, and therefore can't be cast out of it; whether they qualify as "Christian" broadly defined I don't know and won't argue; though my hunch is they don't, for the reasons Halford gives.

Okay, but you're kind of fighting the counter-Reformation there. That is, there are plenty of Protestants who don't belong to any established church of the kind you're talking about, and some of them are nice (to put it childishly) and some of them are nasty (likewise). Looking at prosperity theology and connecting it to not being a member of an established church seems really unfounded.

The Episcopal (Anglican) Church, typically, has multiple, long, and somewhat inconsistent declarations of faith (not quite sure what this means, but I think I know what you mean), while at the same time not much caring if anyone does or does not believe in them or conforms to them (or even has ever read them). So there's that.

And again, Methodists. Long existing, respectable, socially liberal, not systematically associated with prosperity theology. But non-creedal. I'm pretty sure UCC is the same, I'd have to look up Congregationalists but I think they're also in the same tradition.

Further to RH's train of thought, it's probably a good thing that Christians no longer immolate each other for heresy, but if you abandon the concept of heresy, you also de facto abandon the concept of orthodoxy. So you're left with "Christians are people who call themselves Christians", which is fine, but not all that useful for separating the sheep from the goats. Much, much better that autos da fe, but still. It means that Hong Xiuquan with his claim to be God's younger brother Alf was as good a Christian as the Pope or Fred Clark, because he said so.

Essentially the category of Christian has been largely emptied of meaning and I'm going to make a fortune by touring the United States preaching that Donald Trump is possessed by the Holy Ghost.

The Methodist church in my hometown split apart, because of some social issue. I had already left town, so I didn't get the details but it probably involved homosexuality. I know that the bulk of the congregation, following the lead of the dad who wouldn't let his son play "Highway to Hell" on the stereo while we drove to swim meets, left and started a new, non-affiliated church.

93: I keep on getting stuck on Methodists, but unless you're going to write them out of Christianity, a version of Christianity without heresy has been around since at least the eighteenth century. This isn't modern fuzzy-mindedness, it's a long-existing tradition.

93: The most generally accepted definition is probably the Basis of the World Council of Churches: "a fellowship of churches which confess the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour according to the scriptures, and therefore seek to fulfill together their common calling to the glory of the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit." So members have to agree that Jesus is God (so excluding, e.g., Quakers and Unitarians) and believe in the Trinity (excluding, e.g., JWs and Mormons).

93 - I wouldn't go quite that far. You don't need to reestablish the Inquisition or delve deeply into theology to understand that the prosperity gospel stuff (defined well by 81) is not really compatible with Christianity. You just need an extremely superficial reading of the gospels that even a 6 year old can understand. So, while it probably doesn't make sense to call them "not Christians" it's pretty easy (for me) to think of what they're doing as not really Christianity.

85: Okay! Substitute terminology as you see fit, until I make sense.
87: I am totally refighting the Reformation, because I'm reading Iron Kingdom (thanks for the rec, Halford).
To your point: I'm saying all prosperity churches (substituting "prosperity" for my previous use of "evangelical") are non-established churches. That's a modest claim, and solely a correlative one. If there are counterexamples I'll modify "all" as needed.

First, you're using 'established church' really weirdly. I've only seen it used to mean a particular relationship between church and state, like the Church of England. The sort of thing we are specifically not allowed to have in the US. But you clearly don't think that, because you're talking about the US where there are no established churches in that sense.

You're using it to mean bound to a particular set of declarations of faith? What the United Methodist Church called 'creedal' in the page disavowing being a creedal church? Or something else?

Second, and I'll be more certain of this once I know what you think 'established church' means, I don't think the relationship between being an 'established church' and prosperity or other repellent theologies works in either direction. I think you'll be able to find Lutherans, e.g., advocating prosperity theology.

I was also surprised to learn that the Quakers don't really consider themselves Christian at all, but googling suggests that they don't. "The Quaker way has deep Christian roots that form our understanding of God, our faith, and our practices. Many Quakers consider themselves Christian, and some do not. Many Quakers today draw spiritual nourishment from our Christian roots and strive to follow the example of Jesus. Many other Quakers draw spiritual sustenance from various religious traditions, such as Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and the nature religions." OK then. From their official website. I wonder who argued for including the "nature religions" and am hoping it was a surly 17-year-old wiccan.

99, 105: I'm probably misremembering why the Quakers weren't WCC members, as it seems they have finally joined it a few years ago. The individual Quakers I've known have all been very universalist, but of course people like William Penn and George Fox did explicitly preach the divinity of Jesus.

103.1 I'm using "established" to refer to those churches officially established in Europe, in the sense you give; plus the congregations of those churches in the US (eg. Episcopalians).
103.2: I hold that all prosperity churches are not established churches. If you show me the Pope or Lutheran World Federation endorsing a prosperity theology I'll abandon the claim entirely; if you show me the odd individual or congregation I'll modify "all" downward.
Methodists are not established under my definition and have no bearing on the argument.

I knew I shouldn't have joined this discussion as it's sent me all the way down the rabbit hole to find out how wrong I was. Turns out there's a US/UK difference. The Friends General Conference in the USA has been part of the WCC from the start, in 1948, but British Quakers decided not to be part of it because they didn't agree with the use of a credal statement.

Anyway, they're, like the Methodists, not committed to doctrinal uniformity, so if you google for Presbyterian prosperity gospel, you get a fair number of pages opposing it, but also things like this essentially endorsing the proposition that God will materially reward the faithful in this world.

Really, I don't understand why you're talking about 'established churches' as a meaningful category at all in this context.

123: So, just that they can't be 'cast out of the church as frauds' because they're generally not members of any church that's set up for casting out?

If that's all you were saying, then absolutely, I have nothing to disagree with there. (But still note that e.g., Presbyterians are an established church that isn't really set up for the casting out either.)

121 - I don't think 121.1 is fairly read as prosperity gospel. Seems to me that he is simply saying "be aware of and acknowledge blessings" while being careful not to make prosperity-gospel like promises. You can probably find some examples of rogue sermons but it's pretty far afield (I think) from the Presbyterian Church in America (which is itself split in two big branches, certainly the PCUSA abhors prosperity gospel, but I think the right-wing PCA does too).

Yeah. I think what threw me so far off track was your connection of 'established church' with 'church that has a central authority that can throw people out'. There's no necessary relationship between those two things.

But that people preaching prosperity gospel are mostly (maybe universally? I can't think of a counterexample) not doing it as authorized by a central authority in their denomination? That seems absolutely true.

There's a Wikipedia page which suggests some big errors in 122. Nepal was a Hindu kingdom. Apparently Tuvalu (not the Netherlands) is the only country that officially establishes Calvinism in its Constitution. But the list misses a lot of places like Germany, which don't have a single state religion but a lot of more or less de-facto state-supported religions that are effectively established. And also leaves off Scotland, which surely has a Calvinist established church by any reasonable definition.

134 - Yes [scans Wikipedia], formally dissestablished in 1921, which also resolved the lingering remnants of the great Disruption of 1843, by allowing most of the various Scottish presbyterian churches to merge, since the splitters had objected mostly to state interference with the operation of the church.

Oh, Christ. "Established" churches, in the LB sense, which I accept, are state churches. It is a nice point whether the RC church is established in Ireland, or several other countries where the constitution mentions it, or mentions xianity. But it's a special case because it is an explicitly multinational organisation in which the Pope reserves the right to appoint all the bishops. In properly established churches, this right is not extended to foreigners and is in some cases explicitly reserved to the state. That's not secularism because the state is assumed to be Christiain. Membership of the church is necessary for full cistizenship. So it is rule by the laity. Of course, Calvinist churches do not have bishops.
By this definition, let's see: England, Scotland, Wales (until 1922) Norway, Finland (until recently), Denmark), Sweden (until ?2001 but until ~1860 leaving the church was punishable by banishment, and until 1947 there was a short list of denominations to which a Swede could legally belong); in Germany there's a church tax collected by the state; Austria, don't know; orthodox countries, all established. Holland several state-supported churches. Vatican City, proper, full-on establishment.
Methodists in the UK are definitely credal. Baptists, congregationalists, presbyterians, all have creeds, although the older ones will go out of their way to deny that other kinds of Christians (Catholics, eg) are in fact Christians.
There are elements of the prosperity gospel which go against the letter of the broadly accepted Christian creeds, and the whole thing goes absolutely against the spirit of it, as I understand it. BUt I would say that was more broadly true of the megachurch movement in the USA as a whole. I don't know enough to be specific about which groupings. The Vineyard churches are an interesting hybrid.
It looks to me as if MOssy is actually operating on a class basis: "Established" churches are waspy ones. The black churches of the USA again I don't know enough to be dogmatic about. Some are orthodox Christian, some are shitfaced crazy.

But (thought following typing) I think a reasonable definition of "established" is some mixture of the following

1) Supported by taxes collected by the state
2) having a formal political role in the constitution
3) with office-holders appointed by the state
4) conferring legitimacy through coronations or equivalent
5) membership necessary for full political participation
6) judgments of its courts legally enforceable

The church of England gets in under 2,3,4 and 6

OUtside the Vatican, I don't think there's any Christian country where 5 is still formally true

some of th taxes under (1) are voluntary, which is interesting You can opt out but most people don't.

To quibble pedantically with 103.last, I'm not sure you'd find that with Lutherans. AFAIU, conservative Lutherans are more likely to be orthodox doctrinal Lutherans and reject any non-Lutheran influences to theology or liturgy. The most extreme won't even sing hymns written by non Lutherans. I doubt you'd find an embrace of free-wheeling prosperity gospel. Not that it detracts from your larger point.

This is a minor aside, but I feel like Lutheranism is the uncanny sibling to Anglo-American protestantism, not all that different in appearance, but just different enough you can't use it as an insert for generic American protestantism. I remember a million years ago on a different blog someone using the example of contemporary Christians not necessarily being doctrinally literate, and gave the example that it would be plausible to have a Lutheran who didn't know who Martin Luther was. Whether the larger point held I don't know, but I was too distracted by how blindingly wrong the example was.

I also have a problem with academics in my field who use protestant as a shorthand for "certain varieties of 20th-century American Protestantism."

Also, I think Thorn's friend in 72 is an inspiring example of the primacy of practice over theology. Imagine if every theology library were scored on the TF scale -- will this book do more for me than a spliff and an orgasm would?

Second 158 last.
The question of churches against demographics is interesting. Prosperity churches presumably include big numbers of both rich and poor, of all races; whereas what I'm calling established churches I'd guess track mostly with ethnicity (where eg. English, German, Polish, Nicaraguan are all ethnicities).

Also some of us have, in our younger days, sworn "not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library" and I choose to believe that this applies not only to the Library but to all libraries, as all libraries are merely outgrowths of the one Library.